Movies consistently present death in a false or unrealistic way. Real-life death is not always dignified, simple or tidy. Indeed, death can be upsetting, messy, painful and traumatic experience for all parties involved. However, hospice care allows for death to be more dignified and peaceful for both the patient and their loved ones.
Complications Past Initial Illness
Complications can arise during the course of an illness can lead to increasingly worsening circumstances.Immobile or semi-mobile patients may feel determined to walk and my try to get out of bed. As a result, some may fracture or break their hip. As bad as terminal illness is, additional complications can make quality of life worse. Patients may become restricted to their bed and and may rely on a catheter. Regardless of the attempts to prevent it, as soon as they return home, complications such as a yeast infection or urinary tract infection may occur. This causes a patient to become even more frightened and restless. How is anyone supposed to take care of a dying person? It’s a fairly straightforward concept nurse a person back into good health, but how is anyone supposed to nurse them into death with compassion?
Morphine and Agitation
Then there’s the morphine. Dying parents may often feel agitated and restless, so much so that they might try getting out of her bed. The morphine may help to calm them down. Is it unethical to give it to them to address mental rather than physical pain? Although her hip fracture causes pain. Many children give their parents morphine more for their parents restlessness. Is that compassionate, or just wrong? Although these questions are important to ponder, it is essential that medication only be administered as directed by their physician and medical team.
Struggling With Tough Issues
These are the kinds of issues that children with dying parents struggle with every day. Many adult-children caregivers believe that their ill parent wouldn’t have wanted to live this kind of existence. They may have stated that they didn’t want a lingering, drawn-out death. This is why advance directives are so essential. To learn more about advance directives, visit our informational page: Advance Directives Overview
Talking To Dying Parents
When we tell them that they are unable to walk, we may clearly see their frustration and pain. Their frustration may also be seen during their need for assistance going to the restroom. They may become uncommunicative but it is important to appreciate how difficult this is for them. Adult-children caregivers must remain diligent and patient in their task of caring for their parent(s).
Difficult Decisions
Caregivers are often charged with making difficult decisions about how to manage their parent’s affairs post-death. Determining decisions about mortuaries and even determining organ donation are uncomfortable to say the least. But although they are uncomfortable, they are unavoidable. On shows like Grey’s Anatomy, the only organ donors we’re shown are the people involved in deadly car accidents. Nobody talks about considering these kinds of things while the person in question is still awake, thinking and breathing in the next room.
It’s Time to Talk About Dying
It’s time to start an honest and open discussion of what dying really means. How can we help someone we love to pass on? What do “extraordinary measures” mean to different people? To some, it may mean CPR. For others, it might mean giving any medications that can help. Furthermore, what constitutes a tolerable living standard? For instance, what happens when someone is bedridden or unable to control their bowels?
These questions are undoubtedly tough ones. In most cases, they’re mentioned far too late and spoken about with quiet shame out of the earshot of strangers. As a society, we should sincerely hope that, just as we speak with our kids about the realities of sex, we’ll eventually be able to talk with each other about the realities of death.
